02/06/17

I never used to be a fan of Gmail – I always preferred to use the native Mail app on my Mac. But a while ago I started rethinking my whole client onboarding process, and I knew I needed to simplify my email system. As it was, I had three main email inboxes. (One for work, one for personal communication, and an old one that needs to be checked every once in a while) I would mark all emails that needed to be answered as unread, and use that as a to-do list for everything that needed to be dealt with. The problem was that I always had to copy and paste my email templates. Emails could also get lost pretty easily in my inbox if they failed to be marked as unread, or if I simply forgot to make them that way.

01 Inbox Allows for Email Templates

Inbox allows you to create and save multiple email templates (canned replies). Once you’ve created a template, you can compose a new email, and then select any of your templates to auto-fill the draft. Customizing the details is easy once that’s done! It might not sound like cutting out copying and pasting makes that much of a difference, but it really does. Using templates especially helps people like me who don’t necessarily enjoy emailing constantly. Having a template ready to go for new inquiries or new clients makes it feel like I have less work to do, and it makes me reply to people faster. It also means that I don’t have to go sorting through all my general client files to find the right template!

02 Inbox Integrates with Todoist

Another great thing about Inbox is that it integrates with Todoist, which is the to-do list software I use to keep both me and my clients on track throughout a project. Once a client joins a project, I’ll get a notification about it, and I can view the project through my inbox.

03 Inbox Helps You Sort Emails

One of the most important features of Inbox to me is the email bundling system. It was automatically sort emails into different categories like Finance, Social, Promos, and more. You can also add categories and edit what emails go to what categories. So I’ve created four new categories for my inbox – Business Reading (newsletters for creatives that I subscribe to), Clients, Inquiries, and Printers. This lets me sort through everything very quickly!

Emails also stay in the main screen of your inbox until you’ve marked them as done, regardless of whether or not you’ve read them. This is great because you don’t run the risk of accidentally losing or forgetting about an email that needs to be answered! You can always go back and look at every email you’ve received, so marking something as done only removes it from your main view of the inbox, it doesn’t delete or move it.

04 Inbox Lets You Snooze Emails

I’ll get emails throughout the day – and generally the ones that I receive in the late afternoon and evening I’ll wait to answer until the next day. Normally I’d just mark them as unread and leave them in my inbox overnight. But with Inbox, I can snooze emails that I don’t want to deal with in the moment till a later time. This is also really helpful for any emails that might be a little stressful to deal with – you can just make them disappear for a while before dealing with them!

05 Inbox Acts as a Personal To-Do List

On top of bundling your emails, Inbox allows you to add reminders that are either stand-alone or associated with an email. So if I get an important email that requires action, I can add a reminder to myself to answer that email and take care of the action that’s required. I can then look at all my reminders all together to see what needs to get done. This is great for daily to-do lists – you can set reminders for all the tasks that you need to accomplish for that day. And then a program like Todoist can act as a more large-scale to-do list on top of that.

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